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The devastation of Rotterdam was visible from Gerrit's vantage point, and from Cor's too. Separately, each of them stared at the billowing clouds of smoke. Rige, their eldest, stood on the Tedingerstraat, watching the smoke lift and roll out into the sky, staining the blue day black. Rige's pulse sped and slowed again with dread and shame. She thought of an old wives' tale that said picking the koekoeksblom brought thunderstorms, and wondered if she, then, was the culprit. She'd never seen such black clouds.

Within three hours, Rotterdam was in ruins. Neighbouring Schiedam, too, suffered massive destruction. Cor's cousin Cornelia, who helped in the bookstore, stood with her mother and sister in the doorway of their house, watching bombs explode in the schoolyard while air raid sirens screamed and people fled. Their rucksacks were strapped to their backs in case they, too, needed to run. The destruction multiplied when a margarine warehouse erupted, and a strong spring wind spread the shooting flames. The intense heat spun into a whirlwind that lifted roofs off houses, shattered glass, and bent young trees to the ground. The blazing streets grew thick with people fleeing for their lives, but the small details seemed to happen in slow motion - a pot of flowers tumbling from a windowsill, an old man falling. For three days, the core of Rotterdam was black with smoke, and its buildings continued to smoulder; debris rained down on Overschie and beyond. When houses were unlivable but the inhabitants had survived, people left messages for loved ones in the rubble, and walked to a safer place: We are all right, they wrote, and scribbled an alternative address. The Posts in Overschie had been spared by just a few kilometres, but for several days Cor had no news of them or of her brother Gerry and his family, who were living right in Rotterdam. When word finally did filter through that all had survived unharmed, Cor learned that the offices of the shipping company that employed Gerry had been totally destroyed, but that Gerry had set sail just days before the invasion. She was glad that at least he had escaped, but worried for Gerrit as she watched the disciplined band of Wehrmacht soldiers march through the main street. The staccato sound of their boots on the pavement echoed in her mind at night, magnifying her fear that Gerrit had not survived.

Two days after the capitulation, Cor listened as the radio announced that at various points in the Netherlands, German troops would be entering en masse, and that civilian traffic was to be halted between 5:45 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to make way for them. Among the terms of occupation: German "credit certificates" were to be accepted as cash, beer was to be reserved for German officers and soldiers, the air raid blackout would be strictly maintained, and all carrier pigeons would have to be registered, and were forbidden to fly free. Cor remembered the radio reports describing the release of pigeons at the Berlin Olympics, and the announcer saying they'd carried a message of peace to the world. The irony was already astounding - but within two years, the Germans would go further, and order the birds slaughtered, requiring the ringed, severed legs as proof of the deed.

In Rotterdam, there was little time for licking wounds. The bodies, once counted, would number between eight hundred and nine hundred, though the international press estimated much greater figures, reaching as high as one hundred thousand. The New York Times reported that Nazi film footage of the destruction had been shown to correspondents in Berlin, and that the images gave the impression "not a single house . . . was left untouched by fire or some other instrument of destruction." The voice-over accompanying the footage maintained, "The responsibility for this rests on a government that criminally did England's bidding and afterward cowardly left their people to their fate."

Within Rotterdam, the devastation was great, if overstated. Firefighters were called in from other towns and cities, including Leidschendam and Voorburg. People with automobiles were urged to go to the city with food and bandages, and anything that might help with the cleanup of mountains of rubble and charred wood. Meanwhile, the newly homeless flooded out of Rotterdam to surrounding areas like Overschie, and farther on to Leidschendam. Next door to the den Hartogs, the rooms Bep and Henny had vacated were taken over by a family whose house had been swallowed by fire. The couple arrived with a train of little boys behind them. The children looked strangely calm, but the parents' faces were white with shock, even days after the bedlam faded. Cor, too, was stunned. Almost overnight, familiar surroundings had changed profoundly: Vader den Hartog had seen a German plane in the Tedingerbroekpolder beyond the tuin, its broken fuselage embedded in the soft earth. And she and Moeder had seen hundreds of dead and wounded trucked to the Saint Antonius Hospital in Voorburg - mostly Dutch soldiers but Germans too, and apparently also an English pilot and crew whose plane had crashed in the area. It was said that corpses were stacked in the mortuary, and surgery went on in the hallways. Cor ached to think of what might have happened to her own soldier.

For days she kept the radio turned loud, hushing her children so that she could hear every scrap of news. Dutch soldiers must surrender their weapons, the reports said, though the officers, for now, could keep them. Every member of the Dutch army must consider himself a prisoner of war, and troops were ordered to stay where they'd been at the time of capitulation. Later, lying awake in the half-empty bed, she recited psalms to block out what the radio had told her, but the reality was all too raw. If alive, Gerrit was probably a prisoner - but where, and under what conditions? She pulled Rokus, the baby, into bed with her, and curled herself around him, praying for patience and strength and Gerrit's safe return. But for the first time in her life, prayer was insufficient. Even with Rokus there, Gerrit's space in the bed yawned wide beside her, and when sleep wouldn't come, she wrapped herself in a blanket and went out onto the balcony. The crisp night air was soothing, and staring out at the blackness, recalling the sound of Gerrit's voice, the warmth of his hands, and the strength she drew from him, she made a decision. In the morning, she told Moeder and Vader that she couldn't sit waiting any longer. There were rumours that the Germans would order the men back to their original posts, so she was going to find Gerrit, and Strijen was the logical place to start looking. What she'd do when she got there, she didn't know, but she needed to go. Strijen was four hours by bicycle; it would likely take hours more because of barricades and destruction, but she was used to long bike rides - as a girl she'd gone as far as Oosterbeek, near Arnhem, to visit her Tante Ester, and this was closer than that. Gerrit's parents tried to dissuade her - there was no telling what she'd encounter, they said, or which roads had been destroyed in the fighting. "Then I will find other roads," she answered, her expression determined. The next day she hugged each child too hard and left them in their grandparents' care, pedalling fast right from the start of the journey, though Vader had warned her to pace herself. Moeder had filled her rucksack with food and water, sensible things Cor might have forgone, notwithstanding her pragmatic nature. As she passed the chars of Rotterdam and Overschie, tears streamed from her eyes, but she fought the urge to check on Truus, Tom, Maria, and their parents. Foremost in her mind was the necessity of finding Gerrit - getting to him, wherever he was. She wished she'd told him about the baby. She was almost three months pregnant, and though her condition sometimes made her queasy and tired, it gave her an underlying strength that might have vitalized Gerrit, too, in this last while, rather than causing him worry.

These were the things that busied her mind as she raced through South Holland, past the cherry trees in full bloom and the pungent lilac and the sun climbing up in the sky. The meadows laden with marguerite daisies, the yellow iris at the water's edge, were no more than peripheral blurs of colour as she followed the seemingly endless dike roads hemmed by rows of poplar. Today it was the new scars on the land that held her attention, and the Wehrmacht trucks she passed on the narrow roadways, bristling with German soldiers and heaps of absconded weapons. En masse, the men were ominous, with their metal helmets and jackboots, but when she dared to look at their faces - one with a moustache, another with a pug nose - they seemed much like those of men she knew. How can this be happening? she asked herself. She felt strangely fearless, but angry.

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